Make this pizza toast, a throwback snack from a Tokyo kissaten

"owner Setsuko Murakami's mother supposedly invented pizza toast: thick-cut slices of shokupan, or milk bread; slathered with ketchup-based tomato sauce; heaped with toppings such as mushrooms, green peppers, ham and mozzarella; then toasted in the oven until the cheese melted and bubbled. This inexpensive ersatz version of pizza, which many in postwar Japan couldn't afford, became a widespread snack sensation. It's part of the canon of Japanese dishes called yoshoku, "Western-style food.""

"Along the anime corridor of Little Tokyo, a temporary outpost of Kinokuniya bookstore (formerly located on the second floor of Weller Court on Onizuka Street) holds culinary treasures: rows of Japanese cooking magazines with extra-glossy photo-filled pages of recipes, from the everyday to the esoteric. Here collided two of my favorite pop obsessions: pizza toast and Popeye magazine. Both are refractive, cross-cultural, still-thriving artifacts of the 1960s and '70s. Both are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago."

Kinokuniya's Little Tokyo outpost stocks glossy Japanese cooking magazines showcasing a range of recipes. Pizza toast was supposedly invented in 1964 at Cafe Benisica when Setsuko Murakami's mother topped thick shokupan with ketchup-based tomato sauce, mushrooms, green peppers, ham and mozzarella, then toasted it until the cheese bubbled. The inexpensive ersatz pizza became a widespread snack in postwar Japan and joined the yoshoku canon of Western-style dishes. Cafe Benisica's interior was designed by an artist who worked on Akira Kurosawa movie sets, and the cafe still attracts celebrity visitors. Popeye magazine has influential cooking specials and editors visited Los Angeles in the 1970s.

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